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While scholars have explored the profound influence of Iphigenia among the Taurians (IT) on Greco-Roman fiction, including Christian apocryphal Acts, the play has yet to be considered seriously as a potential inspiration on the canonical Acts of the Apostles. A close comparison of IT with the story of the Ephesian riot (Acts 19:21–20:1) reveals a compelling relationship in matters of plot, setting, characterization, purpose, and themes. The Ephesus saga in Acts achieves a creatively miniaturized and satirized recasting of this famous Euripidean play.

This article offers a new interpretation of the wave which, in the finale of Euripides’ Iphigenia Taurica, prevents the Greek ship from leaving the Taurian land, thus making it necessary for the goddess Athena to intervene. My contention is that the wave is the predictable consequence of the sacrilege which the Greeks are committing by stealing Artemis’ cult statue from the Taurian temple. Therefore, we can detect in IT the same religious offence–punishment–compensation structure that can be found in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. However, unlike in Aeschylus’ tragedy, in IT Athena's final decrees compensate only the goddess Artemis and not the human characters: after deeply suffering as instruments of the divine will, not even in the future will they be allowed to fulfil their desires. Thus, we may say that a supernatural ‘wave’ prevents humans from leaving in accordance with their will.

This article begins with an analysis of Simone Weil’s notion of “impersonality”, which implies disengagement from earthly attachments, deep introspection, and connection with an “anonymous” God, that is, with an imagined spiritual force of purity, located beyond the observable secular world. “Impersonality” encourages purification (or catharsis) from frantic passions (excited by such attachments); it inspires love, which Weil associates with respect and selfless devotion to social justice. My goal is to identify a shared set of similarities between Weil and Martin Luther King Jr. on the issue of individual catharsis, acknowledging also important divergences. King—contra Weil—claimed that rejection of frantic passions is incited through connection with a “personal” (rather than “anonymous”) God, with a high moral power, which responds to individual prayers and leads men and women into the path of love. Like Weil, King associated love with mutual respect and social justice. Both Weil and King believed that individual catharsis should lead to civil disobedience, whose ultimate objective is collective catharsis, that is, the abandonment of deeply rooted attitudes and beliefs (on behalf of a collectivity) that (sometimes unknowingly) perpetuate injustices, causing great suffering. By reflecting on the viewpoints offered by these thinkers, the present study will attempt to shed light on the process by which collective catharsis shifts public attitudes. The aim of civil disobedience, I will explain, is to dramatize social evils (such as racism and social exclusion), making large portions of a society aware of their passive reproduction of attitudes that contribute to the perpetuation of such unjust practices.

The meaning of the verb ἀλληγορέω stands at the heart of the debate concerning Paul's hermeneutic in Galatians 4.21–31. If by using the term Paul means ‘I am interpreting these things allegorically’, then the question of Paul's interpretive procedure would be all but answered – he would likely be allegorising as the Greeks did before him and the early church fathers did after. However, if he does not mean this, then the question remains open. This article argues that the phrase ἅτινά ἐστιν ἀλληγορούμɛνα means ‘these things are symbolic’, which would indeed leave this question open. This rendering is best for two reasons: First, the majority of the uses of ἀλληγορέω available in the two hundred or so years surrounding the writing of Galatians mean ‘to speak symbolically’. Second, the contextual clues surrounding Paul's use of the term in Galatians itself, such as his call to hear the law in verse 21, strongly suggest such a reading. To prove this thesis, this article provides detailed exposition of the texts in which ἀλληγορέω occurred around the time Paul wrote Galatians before turning to Paul's own use of the term in Galatians 4.24.

Nearly all Bibles printed in English describe the women of the parable of the ten bridesmaids as holding “lamps” (Matt 25:1–13, also called the parable of the wise and foolish virgins). The implied referent of this English word is an ancient terra-cotta oil lamp, which is neither the best translation of the underlying Greek word nor an appropriate understanding of wedding traditions in the ancient Mediterranean region. Some other scholarly editions of the parable, especially those in the German language, have translated the Greek word correctly as “torches.” In this article, I make the textual case in English and amplify scholarly findings from art history that lead to a clear conclusion: the objects carried by the women in the wedding parable of Matt 25 are torches, not lamps.

The panel set out to investigate how authors used Egypt and its multiform representations to negotiate ideas of poetic, cultural, and political memory by examining Egypt’s association with imperialism and imperial power, the portrayal of Egyptian geography, cultural history, and sacred institutions within and across genres, and the impact of receptions of Egyptian stereotyping on later traditions and scholarship from the first through early fifth centuries ce and beyond. [...]the framing of Egypt as “Other” to articulate and redefine various conceptions of the “Self” and the possibility of moving beyond this binary.2 We also set out to explore Egypt’s relationships to and with power (broadly defined)—such as Roman imperial power, the religious power dynamics between Christianity, paganism, and powerful aesthetic experiences; representations of the landscape, topography, and natural environment of Egypt, including discussions of the landscape’s practical realities and allegorical implications for the Roman imperial project; Egypt’s associations with civil war and sedition, both in response to earlier stereotyping of Egyptians and, especially, Alexandrians, and in relation to broader myths and narratives of internal conflict; and, finally, the rich history and legacy of Egyptian religion and culture and their relationships to Greco-Roman and Christian traditions. Il. 9.381–82), highlights wealth as a major defining feature of Egypt—a feature magnified by its context within a broader discussion of the giving of enormous gifts.8 This comment is echoed in the Odyssey, when Menelaus notes the riches to be found in Thebes, ἐνὶ Θήβῃς / Αἰγυπτίῃς, ὅθι πλεῖστα δόμοις ἐν κτήματα κεῖται, “[the wife of Polybus], who lived in Thebes of Egypt, where the largest amount of wealth is stored in the houses of men” (Hom. [...]as Graciela Zecchin de Fasano demonstrates, Egypt is also intimately connected with many of the work’s other peoples and spaces (2019.117).10 The details of Helen’s Egyptian drugs reveal Egypt’s distance from Greece and, by extension, Greek culture (Hom. Od. 17.415–44), underscores those harsh and threatening characteristics already suggested by Menelaus.18 The Homeric Αἴγυπτος, with its landscapes, riches, ancient knowledge, and potential dangers, is the beginning of a tradition of Greek literary constructions of Egypt (Lloyd 2010b.1069).19 Throughout this tradition, we find authors engaging in broad, varied, and evolving processes of self-reflection and self-fashioning through comparison of the Greek Self with the Egyptian Other20—processes which demonstrate an enduring enthrallment with aspects of Egyptian history, geography, and culture,21 together with a persistent propensity to ignore or avoid the region’s socio-political realities in favour of constructed representations or ideas of Egypt which enable the projection and mediation of Greek fantasies and anxieties.22 Many of the elements that were brought to the fore in Homer can also be found in the self-reflexive discussions of the classical Athenian stage.23 Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women (c. 463 bce) and Euripides’ Helen (412 bce) both explore “issues of erotics, desire, and race . . . configured in relation to death” (Vasunia 2001.12 [quote], 47–53, 64–69), embrace some stereotypes of Greek cleverness vs.

With a few notable exceptions, the word “epinoia” has not been heard with a philosophical ear since the time of Epicurus and the Stoics. In addition to the scarce mentions it had received in philosophy, epinoia was strewn across the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes and, more so, across the canonical body of Christian theology, from Patristics—Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor—to the late Byzantine period. Straddling the divide between the authorities of the nascent Church and those they suspected of heresy, it made a spectacular appearance in Gnostic texts (The Apocryphon of John), cryptically embodying the reconciliation of knowledge and life. On the margins of the Christian tradition, first-century CE controversial religious figures such as Simon Magus associated epinoia with the great goddess and the womb of existence, even as, three centuries later, Eunomius of Cyzicus—the theological arch-enemy of the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil and Gregory—deplored it for its hollowness and pure conventionality. In this paper, I argue that epinoia is the figure of anarchic intelligence in theology and philosophy alike. The anarchy of epinoia is its note of defiance: the escape from power it plots is the most serious challenge to power, the royal road to liberation from the oppressive unity of Being, Mind, or Concept.